During the reigns of Trump I and Trump II the United States has suffered catastrophic damage. President Trump engages in deliberate cruelty. He, and his cronies, plunder the wealth and honor of the United States for personal gain.
Our national Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall - and is falling further with each passing day.
One wonders whether all the king's horses and all the king's men can put our national Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The Problem, In General
Our national wealth is being looted, our residents are being abused (or killed) and led into medically and financially counterproductive acts, We now have a national secrete police force that operates beyond any Constitutional constraints. Our governmental institutions have been dismantled, badly handicapped, or diverted from their intended purposes. Our nation's foreign affairs have fallen into disarray, our national reputation among nations has become negative, and we have initiated both trade and actual wars - which we seem to be losing. This has pushed many Americans into actual or near poverty while simultaneously crating an ultra wealthy oligarchy that has no serious fear of legal restraints or repercussions.
Congress has become a puddle of children capable of doing nothing positive; half of Congress has abandoned thought and simply follows whatever nonsense comes from the White House. And Congress has abandoned many of its powers thus permitting a Royal Presidency to grow and take control.
Our Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has become a corrupt institution that decides cases on fabricated data and fantastical histories intended and shaped to support desired outcomes. And SCOTUS now often works without the benefit of actual hearings where the parties present arguments in open court.
Indeed SCOTUS began to dismantle our country years before Trump or MAGA. The court under Roberts has become a Robert Moses style bulldozer trying to transform our country in a land of white religious nationalism, of rule by the wealthy and large corporations. The elevation of religion by SCOTUS might make one wonder whether the Justices of the Supreme Court should retire their black robes in favor of Crusader tunics? SCOTUS seems hell bent to resurrect the United States as it was before the Civil war, before the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, a time of racism, discrimination, lassez-faire industrialism, and robber barons.
There are several aspects to the problem facing us:
Presidential power has become excessive to the degree that it resembles 17th century Royal authority of a king. Some of this power is from the Constitution itself (such as the pardon power), but much has accumulated through statutory grants by Congress.
Executive branch agencies, such as the Department of Justice and the President's Office of Legal Counsel (part of the Dep't of Justice), rather than pursuing wrong doing has become an agency dedicated to the protection of that wrongdoing. This has the side effect of running-out the statute of limitations clocks and thus preventing inquiries by a future administration.
Executive agencies (such as the Department of Justice) have been converted into political weapons against citizens, residents, and others.
Anonymous death squads are killing people (including US citizens) on the streets of our country. Few, if any, of these deaths commited by ICE and CBP agents are investigated by the Federal Justice Department. Indeed, the Justice Department is actively blocking investigations by states.
Congress is often deadlocked. And even if not deadlocked, Congress is finding that over the last 250 years that it has handed enormous powers to the President.
The US Senate routinely confirms nominees for high office who lack qualifications or who are quite biased.
The only tool that Congress has to recall these bad and wrongly confirmed nominees is impeachment. Impeachment is a slow process, and it has been largely neutered by those who conflate impeachment, a political act, with a criminal prosecution.
Federal policy is being enacted less by Congress and more through Presidential Executive Orders.
The Supreme Court has become a vehicle to pursue personal biases of the justices rather than an institution that delivers decisions made on the basis of fair, factual and unbiased consideration of law and fact.
The "Shadow Docket" has become a means for the Supreme Court to choose and impose national policy and create law without ever holding a hearing or publishing an opinion.
Our Constitution has been contorted so that provisions are interpreted to mean something quite different from their author's intentions and the clear language.
Presidential elections are increasingly structurally biased in favor of low population states.
Voting is being restricted and voting districts reshaped to assure that the Trump/MAGA party wins nearly all elected offices at all levels of government.
Federal agencies use private actors to perform tasks that are prohibited to the government and to lock-in gifts of Federal authority and money by using contracts that are often beyond the reach of the courts or Congress.
Bribes to Trump/MAGA supporters are embedded into uncontested settlements to contrived lawsuits.
Corruption, bribery, and insider trading are rampant. Vast amounts of wealth and property have been transferred to government officials in apparent exchange for favorable government decisions, allocations of money, property valuable privileges, or immunity from government review. Trump/MAGA administration insiders, in particular Trump family members, appear to be using insider or secret information to buy positions in companies and technologies that will (according to the insider information) be the recipients of government contracts, largess, and favorable policies.
Our Supreme Court has looked at this duck that quacks like bribery, walks like bribery, and smells like bribery and has declared that it is somehow not bribery.
The "emoluments" clauses in our Constitution have been rendered as vacuous platitudes with no force nor anyone with "standing" to complain that they are being abused.
Clear and strict dividing lines between governmental roles and private roles have eroded and faded.
Legal title to assets has been intentionally muddied or clouded. Take, for example, the Qatar bribe-jet. Is it private property or is it owned by the United States? (If the answer is "private" than one must ask why taxpayers are paying the better part of a billion dollars to upgrade it?)
In a quite literal sense, concrete is being poured around Trump/MAGA decisions. Are we going to be willing to tear down Trump's East Wing "Ballroom" or his obscenely gaudy "arch"?
Policy and acts of the government are increasingly being justified by, and hidden from view, under diffuse and vague claims of national security.
Data collected at great public expense over the decades has been obliterated and is likely to be non-recoverable. Musk's DOGE was an act of wanton national vandalism and mass destruction of our national institutional memory.
The Federal judiciary has been packed with politically and religiously biased judges.
Religious belief has been elevated into both weapon that people can use to impose their beliefs upon non-consenting others and a shield to prevent others from regulating actions that are claimed to protected religious exercises.
The Equal Protection clause of our 14th Amendment has been effectively nullified.
Our Constitution, as was recognized when it was being made, is not proof against the kind of political and religious factions that we have today.
It is interesting to compare the offenses and crimes of the Trump/Maga administration with those recited against King George III of England in our Declaration of Independence
The similarities are striking.
Notice in particular these accusations from our Declaration of Independence (spelling is from the original document):
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Statutes of Limitation are going to be troublesome. The author believes that a strong case should be made to toll (suspend) Statute of Limitations time periods for at least as long as the defendants were able to block enforcement. Various states have, at times, changed their Statutes of Limitations, even to the degree of extending them so that crimes that were once timed-out from enforcement have become once again enforceable. These changes have withstood Constitutional review.
Our national government, particularly under the Trump/MAGA administration is enamored with slapping national security and classification labels onto everything, whether those labels are appropriate or not.
Such labels make it difficult to examine relevant materials and discover hidden wrong doing.
We may need to create an Office of National Declassification that has the role and the power to examine such materials and remove inappropriate or excessive classification and national security barriers.
Scope
We ought to abandon hopes of redressing every one of the Trump/MAGA era abuses - there are just too many of them.
Moreover many of those abuses are not directly linked to the US Government but are, instead, largely private. For example, Trump and his family have run a crypto-coin business - some consider it a scam in business clothing - that has made billions of dollars for Trump and family while losing even more billions, largely from the packets of private investors and customers. Should that be in-scope for this American Tribunal? Good arguments can be made that this is better left to our civil legal system, but in a way that avoids blockage by statutes of limitation or Presidential immunities. This website will, however, proceed on the assumption that at least some of these wrongs ought to be within the jurisdictional scope of this American Tribunal.
Excessive Presidential Powers, Reinforced By A Compliant Supreme Court
Our United States Constitution puts most power into the hands of the legislature - Congress - and the States. The executive, the President, has relatively less power, which is to faithfully execute the laws enacted by the legislature. There are, a few powers that the president has, such as the Pardon power, which are (at least for now) exclusively under the control of the President.
Over the nearly two and a half centuries since the Constitution came into force Congress has been gifting effectively irrevocable powers to the President while sitting quietly as the President grabs other powers.
Our Supreme Court, which has not always been deferential to Presidential overreach, has recently become little more than a rubber stamp; our President now resembles absolutist French King Louis XIV.
The reason why, as a practical matter, Congress can not revoke its grants of power to the President is that the grants were originally made in the form of statutes, enacted by Congress and signed by the President (or passed without the President's signature via a veto override). Revoking these grants requires that the original statute be repealed or replaced. That would require the assent of the present President. Presidents have been reluctant to relinquish any authority ; thus we will rarely see a Presidential signature on an act by Congress that revokes powers, even if the current President has no intention of using those powers.
There is debate whether a treaty made between the US and another nation could override a statute and thus potentially retrace powers that have been granted to the President. However, given that treaties are made by the President (subject to the often forgotten power of the Senate to advise, and always subject to the need for the Senate to consent) it is unlikely that we would see a President making a treaty that would reduce or restrict his authority.
There is a recent article regarding the difficulty of Congress reclaiming delegated authority. (This article is more optimistic than I am.):
The Supreme Court is a world of almost royal and insular hubris. The justices effectively hold their jobs for their lifetimes and the justices consider themselves beyond and above the world that the rest of us occupy. As such, the justices value what they perceive to be their reputations (which may be quite at odd with the reputation that the public holds for them.) So a possible influence on the Justices could come from those who argue before the court and who submit amicus briefs.
Use Of Contracts and Settlement Agreements To Lock-In Policy, Grants Of Authority, and Grants of Money
Over the last fifty or so years the Federal government has discovered that it can launder its ultra vires acts through private actors. This is often done using pretty phrases such as "public-private enterprise". Or more recently this practice of laundering lack-of-government authority has become more mainstream such as by passing the torch to friendly states - think of Alligator Alcatraz - or to private corporations such as Palintir that are either friendly to the Trump/MAGA universe or that are simply looking to gain Federal favors, such as approval for anti-competitive mergers.
Contrived Cases Tailored To Appeal To the Biases And Predilections of Judges On the Federal Appellate and Supreme Courts.
A recent innovation is the practice of initiating private civil lawsuites against the government. These are often highly tailored with selected sympathetic plaintiffs and filed in Federal districts with but one friendly judge. These cases are then "settled" without any real contest, thus amounting to a sub-rosa transfer of Federal assets into private hands under cover of a legal settlement.
One of the strongest reasons in favor of significant reform of the Supreme Court is that the plaintiffs of these tailored cases design those cases to come before the known panel if the nine SCOTUS justices. Reform would expand SCOTUS and add randomization so that plaintiffs could not know in advance which Justices on SCOTUS will hear the case.
Use Of Threats and Violence to Deter Opposition
No Means To Enforce Constitutional or Other Violations
Our national Constitution, legal, and judicial systems were constructed on a presumption that those at the top would tend to be people with at least some ethical constraints and not be mob bosses who boast of having more power than Atilla the Hun.
The Trump/Maga regime has taken advantage of that presumption, brewed in a large dose of reading our Constitution and laws with the intent of finding or inventing ambiguity, and flavored with an army of lawyers who have read every right wing conspiracy legal theory and used those to delay or stop even those few enforcement actions that have been attempted. One has only to look at the fate of the first two impeachment procedures against Trump and the derailment of criminal cases against him by judge Aileen Cannon to observe how strong and meritious legal cases have been derailed.
On top of that our Supreme Court has embued the Presidency with immunities that are nothing less than Royal and created an iron wall of "qualified immunity" against actions, even violent and homicidal actions, of police and other officers who carry out the policies of the Trump/Maga regime.
These aspects, along with others, below, have formed an effective barricade against efforts to hold the Trump/Maga regime to account.
Blurred Responsibility
The second Trump term began with the onslaught of Elon Musk and the never clearly chartered or officially established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk and DOGE came into Federal agencies like Atilla the Hun reborn, cutting, tearing, and destroying with apparently nearly random, and certainly uninformed, abandon. The actors in this act of governmental pillage are largely unknown (as is the source of their authority, if any.)
A similar blurring has occurred with ICE and CBP - at the level where officers of those agencies interact with (and beat, tear gas, arrest, and detain) citizens and residents the officers are masked an unidentifiable.
Governments tend towards opaque decision making. However, the Trump administration has turned opacity into a refined art.
Standing
Our Federal judicial system requires that there be a valid and real "case" or "controversy". And one must have a real and somewhat unique stake in that case or controversy - absent that one would lack "standing" and thus denied us of the Federal judical system. The concept of legal "standing" has become a large barrier that allows Federal executives and agents to escape lawsuits that question their actions.
Assertions of Federal Preemption of State Police Powers.
The term "Police Powers" is far more broad than the powers of states to deploy law enforcement at the state or local level.
See the explaination of "Police Powers" at the Legal Information Institute https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/police_powers:
Police powers are the fundamental ability of a government to enact laws to coerce its citizenry for the public good, although the term eludes an exact definition. The term does not directly relate to the common connotation of police as officers charged with maintaining public order, but rather to broad governmental regulatory power.
The Unites States is a nation constructed on the notion of "dual sovreignty" - a division of power and authority between the Federal governemnt and each of the individual states (and the people.) This dual sovreignty is expressed in the Tenth Amendment to the US constitution, which carves out a large realm of sovreignty to the States (and people) of the United States. There is partial overlap with the Federal sovreignty. In that area of overlap, and only in that area of overlap, does the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution establish the primacy of Federal law. This is a complex part of our national law and the hazy dividing line between State and Federal authority has often shifted.
The Trump/MAGA administration (not unlike other administrations) has tried to dismiss botehrsome, but legitmate exercise of state police powers, by claiming Federal pre-emption. We are seeing this play out now in the efforts by the Federal Justice Department to prevent the state of Minnesota from investigation (and perhaps prosecuting) ICE and CBP officers who killed innocent citizens on the streets of Minneapolis.
Odd Judicial and Legal Interpretations
One only has to glance at decisions of Federal courts, whether at the District Court level, or at the SCOTUS level to see some positively bizarre outcomes that favor the Trump/MAGA side.
Some of these are the result of clear forum shopping, such as filing in Federal judicial courts that have exactly one biased judge - such as in the Texas panhandle region. And the odd decisions that came from judge Aileen Cannon defy logic, reason, and established law.
One can only look with horror on SCOTUS' coronation of the US Presidency (and Trump in particular) with a crown of immunity in the case of Donald J. Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593.
A similar process has been occuring with the Dep't of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). This group operates as a sort of Presidential directorate of legal interpretations. Many of those interpretations are taken and used Federal agencies as if they were law. The OLC has imagined into effective reality a set of immunities and powers for the President that are not to be found in the US Constitution or Federal law. One such is the assertion that the President may not be subject to criminal prosecution while in office (yet while the statute of limitations clock keeps on ticking.) OLC "opinions" or their written rationales are often kept secret.
Return Of the Lochner Era - Making it Difficult To Change Contracts and Agreements
The Trump administration has made significant use of contractual vehicles (such as "non disclosure agreements" [aka "NDA"s], ad hoc purchase orders (such as for "the ballroom"), and uncontested settlements to contrived lawsuits made against the government.
The United States has long been reluctant to delve into things that might be argued to involve agreements in which at least one party is a private actor.
Article I, Section 10, Clause 1 of our Constitution restricts our 50 states: "No State shall ... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts"
And we have suffered through what has been called the Lochner Era during which SCOTUS effectively elevated such agreements to a level of primacy over Federal and State laws and regulations.
It is difficult to bottle-up into a concise statement the TME use of "agreements" as vehicles for imposition of Executive branch policy (without any participation by Congress) or the making of bribes (using the generally accepted use of that word rather than SCOTUS' contorted and limited definition). Nonetheless this practice, because it has the scent of being an voluntary agreement with a private person or private entity, tends to be considered off limits and thus considered immutable by a unilateral act of government.
Laundering Of Goals Through Private Actors
Much of our Constitution, and many of our laws, apply only only to behaviour of the Federal or State goverments. Putatively private acts by private actors are accorded greater freedom.
The authors of our Constitution and laws always presumed that goveremental acts would be carried out by governmental actors.
That is no longer true.
Over the years the Federal and State goverments have engaged in "public-private parterships." Most of these were rational procedures, but they did begin to create uncertaintly about who or what was exercising power and who or what bore responsibility for faults or harms.
In the late 19th and early 20th century some US policy, particularly, in the Carribean or Latin America, was carried out by private (and often armed and violent) "filibusters."
That progressed through CIA actions in places like Iran and Cuba where the US used non-government actions to destabalize foreign governments.
Under Presidents Reagan and Bush funds and arms were moved between Iran and Nicaragua, contrary to US law. Almost no one was punished for this and those in the Federal goverment learned that illegal actions, when well hidden or performed on behalf of the President, could escape prosecution or punishment.
The January 6, 2022 insurrection and subsequent pardons tought many people that violence could not only escape punishment but could even be rewarded.
Elon Musk's use (or denial) of Starlink to Ukraine in its fight against Russia has shown how US corporations have become almost independent actors in the exercise of US authority in international affairs.
Our courts are reluctant to pierce the vail of "private actor" to reveal the hand of the Federal government pulling the puppet strings.
Solutions May Require Looking Past Tradition and The Constitution
Houston, we have a problem.
